Moms teaching tin
Linguistics student’s research shows how They might not be saying “goo-goo ga-ga,” but mothers are actually speaking baby talk each time they read to their young children. That’s according to a new study by Robin Fritche, who is working toward her PhD in linguistics at UWM. Her new paper, “Do adults produce phonetic variants of /t/ less often in speech to children?” was published earlier this year in the Journal of Phonetics. To conduct her research, Fritche recorded mothers reading to their young children, about ages 1-2. She analyzed their speech patterns to determine whether and how the mothers enunciated /t/ sounds. Then, she repeated the experiment while having the mothers read to an adult, and compared the results. Her findings have implications for how young children develop their language skills, and perhaps even Englishas-a-foreign-language students learn a new tongue. Fritche sat down via Zoom to talk about her work. As a mother of a young child myself, I’ve never thought about how I read to him. How did you become interested in moms’ pronunciation? I had two advisors on this article: My advisor, Jae Yung Song, and [her] former postdoc advisor, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. They had found previously, comparing mothers’ speech to the children’s speech, that mothers were pronouncing /t/ sound variants more than the kids. The next steps were to see, are the moms speaking normally to the kids, or for some reason, are they still using those enunciated /t/s? The next step was to compare how moms talk to kids versus how they talk to adults, and see if there’s a difference. How old were the kids? They were a bit younger than one, up to two years. My youngest was 10 months. They’re starting to gear up to talk. We figure that mothers might be unconsciously expending a bit more effort just because of the stage of language acquisition their child is in. 6 • IN FOCUS • September, 2021
So, moms might want to really enunciate /t/s so that their child will pick up those sounds and mimic them. Right. When many people think of child-directed speech, they think of, “Do you want your ba-ba?” But that’s not what we’re looking at. We’re just looking at, within normal speech, are mothers making different sounds? Are they treating the children differently than they would speak to adults? Why did you go with moms over dad? Generally, women would be more likely to be more proper, to use more standard language than men, which has been found in other studies. That meant there would be fewer things to control for. Plus, the register would be different between the voices. We didn’t want to have to control for other variables. What’s so special about the letter T? Why did you focus this experiment on /t/ sounds? The /t/ is made on a bumpy ridge behind the teeth. It’s called the alveolar ridge. That ridge is where we make sounds for T, D, R, L, N, S, and Z. The /t/ can be pronounced many ways. We can think about the letter T like a category. As native speakers, sometimes /t/ is really well-enunciated and sometimes it’s not. That is how people seem to describe it.
